Don't have room in the budget for all the bandwidth you'd like? Users griping about Internet wait times? What's an IT mom to do? What parents of modest means have always done: Plug the leaks, patch the holes, and stretch the meals with bread.

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Like this article? We recommend

With the help of a couple of sharp cookies you'll meet further in,
we've built you this guide for making the most of the bandwidth you have by
optimizing servers in your Windows environment. Depending on your situation, it
could help a littleor a lot.

Sometimes optimizing means fixing a big oversight that's just begging to
be found. We know of one admin who wasn't watching usage at remote sites. A
year before, he had implemented a nightly remote backup of an important server
over the 512KB frame relay link, but he didn't follow up. The backup was so
big that it was slopping over into the daytime. The Net connection was
completely saturatedand had been for at least a year, according to one
employee at the East Coast firm, who suggested that the admin look for a problem
at the server level: "The users at our location were either too ignorant to
know that there was something wrong or too cowed to speak up."